The second keynote the first morning of Open Web Vancouver was presented by Tim Bray - The Future Face of the Web

The future of web technology, including standards and XML, with reference to the wide range of technologies encompassed in Open Source.

Tim began his talk by asking how many in the crowd were developers, designers, managers, or communicators. He followed up by taking another survey of which frameworks attendees are using for their projects - PHP and .NET seemed to rule the room.

“Contributors to the web” are various people with ranging knowledge of the internet and technologies that make up the most every day of applications. He then went on to describe various languages such as PHP (an example of a PHP application would be WordPress, which is the platform for this website and blog) and then spoke about Rails.

Tim’s feature of Rails was a sheer love-fest, which was really great seeing as how it’s the foundation of E-xact’s Realtime Payment Manager. Two assertions in Rails are DRY (dont repeat yourself) and COC (convention over configuration). He also proclaimed Rails as “a good choice for your next project,” and that reading a Rails book will have a very positive influence on the way you design things for the web. Tim believe that Rails is picking up steam for several reasons including the fact that unit testing hard to avoid, it has incredibly compact code, it’s clean, object-oriented, and well-designed.

Moving on from frameworks, the keynote addressed social media tools like blogs and Twitter are part of the new culture of contribution which is good for business as it encourages the flow of information and communication. Here are Tim’s words of advice:

1. Listen
2. Don’t Lecture
3. Be intense:
4. Be human:
5. Correct yourself
6. Be brief:
7. Update often: With of all your projects for the “short attention span generation” have something new to bring people back and keep them interested in what you have to say. This applies to content AND software, “release early, release often,” and take an agile approach.
8. LINK: Link from your community, corporate website etc. if you put something on your piece of the web and don’t link anywhere else, “then you’re saying you know everything - and you’re wrong and your audience will know this,” suggests Tim. He says make people happy by sending them away ie. you only spend maybe 3 seconds on the Google home page but it’s the page you may visit most in a day.
9. Look good : Have a talented designer

Whether it’s with your website, blog, clients, customers, employees and your team at work, create a conversation. There will be more to come from Open Web Vancouver over the next two days.

Read the other blog posts in this series: First Keynote at Open Web Vancouver…

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